Our Mission

Our mission is to ensure complete transparency in healthcare billing and pricing, enabling a fair and competitive system that works for all Americans.

Our Goal

Our goal is to make sure price transparency is required of ALL contributors to the healthcare system. When price transparency is required for doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, insurance companies, and every other participant in the American healthcare system, we will have the foundation of a functional healthcare market that we can trust. Trust that empowers consumers is the cornerstone of a healthy marketplace which is competitive, fair, and motivates constant improvement.

Once the shroud of secrecy in healthcare pricing is removed, policymakers (i.e., politicians and regulators) will be able to see where we over-diagnose, overtreat, and overpay, as well as where we may not be investing enough to achieve the outcomes we deserve.

Helping Patients

While we are ultimately fighting for healthcare price transparency, we are determined to empower patients today, by providing the system and the tools any patient can use to dispute their own medical bills and by providing information and self-help resources to help everyone become better healthcare consumers.

Price transparency won’t fix everything that is wrong with the American healthcare system, but nothing can be fixed without it.

Why Price Transparency?

Price transparency is essential to a functioning market. The U.S. healthcare system cannot operate as a healthy market without it. Price transparency ensures a basic economic principle is at work: Price discovery.

Price discovery means that we can learn the price we will pay before choosing to move forward with a transaction. Often confused with cost estimation, price discovery does not suggest that we know how much money we will spend in advance. Just as we order food in a restaurant without knowing what our check will be at the end of the meal, price discovery simply implies that we must be informed of the price of everything that we might purchase.

The U.S. has the most expensive yet least effective healthcare of any other high-income nation (OECD 2015). Without price transparency, we will never understand why.

At the same time, prices continue to grow faster than our economy or inflation rate with nothing to show for the higher cost.

Prices are disconnected from both supply and demand and quality, a very abnormal relationship not observed in functional marketplaces.

Healthcare accounts for approximately 18% of U.S. GDP, which is about double what other developed nations spend as a percentage of their GDP (OECD 2015). Without price transparency, the gap is likely to get larger.

Healthcare procedures are among the most expensive services a consumer buys. Costs often exceed the price of a car and can sometimes be costlier than a house. Annual spending on healthcare and health insurance premiums often exceeds today’s mortgage payments. Price transparency will enable consumers, ensure competition and fairness, foster trust, and ultimately lead to a lower overall cost of healthcare.

There is no standard pricing for healthcare; one patient can pay 10 times, or even 1200 times or more than what another pays for the same procedure in the same facility under the same circumstances. No other marketplace would allow this to happen. Price transparency will make sure it not longer can.

Would you like to learn more? Read our Transparency whitepaper PDF.

Our Team

David Silverstein

David Silverstein

David Silverstein is a highly regarded strategist, innovator, author and public speaker with a passion for addressing the dysfunction plaguing the American healthcare system. A repeat entrepreneur, he’s built and operated everything from his management consulting firm, Lean Methods Group to a small novelty business to his non-profit, BrokenHealthcare.org.

Experienced in methodical approaches to strategy, innovation and process improvement (the focus of Lean Method Group), David has most recently focused his strategic intentions on what he refers to as “America’s economically dysfunctional healthcare system.”

A frequent speaker and media source on topics related to innovation, strategy and global trends, David is best known for his deep insights and ability to see the common threads among seemingly disparate concepts while at the same time making complex subjects easy to understand without losing their significance. He has been featured in or has written for The Washington Post, The Economist, Inc. Magazine, The Robb Report, CNBC, NPR, Fox News and many other media outlets.

Brian Mathwich, MD

Brian Mathwich, MD

Brian has practiced family and occupational medicine in Colorado for 25 years.

He has been involved in numerous medical practice and medical related startups including primary care, specialty medical practices, and medical billing and consulting. His passion to improve the American healthcare system is apparent in everything he does.

Dr. Mathwich received his medical degree from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and had an MBA concentrating in healthcare administration from Regis University. He has authored articles on process improvement in small practices, outsourcing, primary care medical coding and computerization in medicine. He has also lectured extensively on medical coding.

Dr. Mathwich has a long history with the United States military, serving as an enlisted infantryman in the Marine Corps, and, after 9/11, joining the Army Reserve as a physician. He served three overseas deployments; two in Iraq. While in Iraq, Dr. Mathwich served as the medical team leader at Saddam Hussein’s international tribunal in Baghdad, and on his second tour, provided medical care to detainees in the maximum-security compound at Camp Bucca, Iraq.

Over the years, Brian has seen medicine change from small group practices where physicians developed personal relationships with their patients and families, to the mega groups of today where both doctors and patients are impersonal numbers. He brings real world, front line medical experience to Broken Healthcare, and joined its efforts to change public policy and defend patients from abusive medical billing practices in 2019.

Marty Makary, MD

Marty Makary, MD

Martin “Marty” Makary is an English-American surgeon, New York Times bestselling author, and Johns Hopkins health policy expert. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, TIME, Newsweek, and CNN, and appears on NBC and Fox News. He is the author of The Price We Pay, a book about how business leaders and families can lower their health care costs and the grass-roots movement to restore medicine to its mission of serving patients.

Dr. Makary practices surgical oncology and gastrointestinal surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and teaches public health policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He works in health care innovation, quality measurement science, frail and vulnerable populations, and public health disparities. He served in leadership roles at the United Nations World Health Organization for the Safe Surgery Saves Livesinitiative. Makary was named one of the most influential people in healthcare by Health Magazine. In 2018, Makary was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

Makary is an advocate for disruptive innovation in medicine and physician-led initiatives such as The Surgical Checklist, which he developed at Johns Hopkins, and which was later popularized in Atul Gawande’s best-selling book, Checklist Manifesto. In 2016, Makary and his colleagues exposed loopholes in the Orphan Drug Act accounting for higher drug pricing. His article “The Orphan Drug Act: Restoring the Mission to Rare Diseases”, covered by Kaiser Heath News, led Senator Grassley’s office to announce an investigation into the problem. Makary has advocated for the need for more transparency in healthcare and better-quality metrics for hospitals and physicians. The American College of Surgeons recommended Makary for the position of Surgeon General of the United States.

Dr. Makary and David Silverstein have worked closely together on public policy initiatives aimed at bringing greater transparency to healthcare pricing and quality. Through Brokenhealthcare.org, they also teamed up to help patients dispute unfair medical bills, forcing hospitals to drop more than one million dollars’ worth of law suits in 2019.

Felix Weitzman, Ph.D.

Felix Weitzman, Ph.D.

A visionary leader who is always on the cutting edge of disruptive business practices, Felix is a seasoned operations executive who knows how to get things done. Felix is an expert in transforming business processes, leading organizations through change, and building foundations for sustainable growth. With a customer-centric view, and a bias for action, Felix has led large teams of seasoned professionals in world-class organizations such as Accenture, First Data and Axiom. Now he brings his experience to Broken Healthcare and its efforts to transform the American healthcare system.

With a scientific mind, Felix balances innovation and tactical execution of new ideas. Getting down into the details, while maintaining a long-term strategic perspective on organizational success has allowed Felix to become the go-to person for some of the world’s most complex and abstract business problems.

Felix is a former Israeli Airforce officer, holds degrees in Economics and Finance from the University of Massachusetts, and an MBA and Ph.D. in Organizational Performance and Change from Colorado State University, where he is also an adjunct professor.

Felix joined the board of Broken Healthcare in 2019 to bring his considerable skills leading complex change efforts to bear on the dysfunctional American healthcare system.

Aaron Starr

Aaron Starr

Aaron Starr brings more than 15 years of wide-ranging legal experience to his role as Chief Legal Officer and Board Member for BrokenHealthcare.org. He is a solutions-focused, problem solving attorney with extensive domestic and international corporate, transactional, and litigation experience.

In his role as Chief Legal Officer, he is responsible for the overall legal strategy and operations, organizational governance matters, litigation and risk management, transactions, and legal and regulatory compliance. Aaron also supports the organization’s advocacy efforts and development of healthcare public policy initiatives.

In addition to being an integral member of the BrokenHealthcare.org team, Aaron serves as Chief Legal Officer for Amaze, a start-up public benefit corporation, which provides employer-sponsored education along with a subscription-based mobile service that enables employees and their families with everything they need to manage their own health care. He also serves as General Counsel for Lean Methods Group, a management consulting firm specializing in the application of highly collaborative and methodical approaches, including Lean and Six Sigma, to business performance improvement. In both roles, Aaron provides counsel on a wide variety of complex legal issues, including drafting and negotiating all contracts and licenses, ensuring data privacy and security compliance, advising on corporate and board governance matters, and managing all litigation and claims.

Prior to his current roles, Aaron enjoyed a successful career in private practice at the law firm of Conrad O’Brien PC, Philadelphia, which is ranked among the top firms in Pennsylvania for commercial litigation practice by Chambers and Partners. He had a broad based litigation practice focusing on complex commercial and employment matters involving Fortune 500 companies, and defense of legal and medical professional liability claims against AmLaw 100 firms and a world-renowned pediatric hospital.

Aaron earned his law degree from Rutgers University Law School and his Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, from Gettysburg College.